This application relates to a system for ensuring uniform color of finishes for cabinet doors.
Cabinets for modern residential applications are often sold in large retail locations. Typically, a sample cabinet may be provided at the retail location, and samples of all possible colors for the cabinets will also be provided. Consumers may order a cabinet, and the cabinets manufactured at a remote factory are shipped to the consumer.
Some quality control is required to ensure the color of the actual manufactured cabinet and its doors are close to the color presented to the consumer when making the purchase. Thus, it is known in the prior art to have sample doors maintained at a manufacturing facility that can be compared to the manufactured doors to ensure the manufactured doors are within an acceptable color range. It is typical that doors of a nominal, acceptable light extreme and an acceptable dark extreme are selected, and actual manufactured doors are compared to these two samples to ensure the manufactured doors are within the range. Typically, sample doors are selected from manufactured doors to provide the extreme samples, and must be replaced periodically.
The use of the actual selected doors does raise some concerns, however. First, over time, the range between the extreme light and extreme dark doors can vary. This is true because wood substrate variations and stain material variations exist from lot to lot. In addition, the doors may be manufactured at several facilities spaced across the country and even across continents. As such, it is difficult to maintain any set standard for the color of the manufactured doors that can be ensured to be within an acceptable range of the sample doors which have been utilized to make the consumer sale.